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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Alexis left for Florida tonight to visit her mother and aunts so it is me and the two boys (21 & 10) for a few days. Burgers, dogs, and pizza? Not so far.

I had some chicken thighs, a bottle of Mr. Yoshida's Original Sweet and Savory sauce. It had a suggestion of mixing the sauce and peanut butter for a quick "Thai peanut sauce". While not real Thai, it inspired me to have some fun and Thai one on.

InstructionsMix the teriyaki sauce, peanut putter and red pepper together. Marinade the thighs in the sauce for 2 hours. If you like it hotter, add in the seeds from the chili pepper.

Remove the chicken from the marinade and shake off excess marinade. Place on a 375-400f grill over direct heat for 5 minutes. Flip and cook over direct heat for another 5 minutes.

[On the Big Green Egg, this was done using a grid extender so the meat is about 8-10 inches from the heat source.]

Move to indirect heat (adding the plate setter on an Egg. For a gas grill, you have one side or burner on and put the meat over an unheated area and close the lid) and cook at the same temp until the thighs hit 180f internal temp. This takes about 10-15 minutes at the 4oof cooking temp.

I cheated and whisked up some more Yoshida sauce and peanut butter to use as a glaze as the thighs came off the grill. Garnish with thinly sliced green onion or some cilantro.

(If you just refuse to grill, you could do all of this in an oven for about an hour at 350f.)

Stir fried rice is always good but tonight I wanted something a little different, so I used some dried egg noodles that I got at our local Asian market.Thai Me Up Stir Fried Noodles

Heat a wok over medium high heat. Add in and whisk together chicken stock, Yoshida's, peanut butter, honey, ginger, red pepper flakes and diced red pepper for about 1 minute. If needed, add a little slurry of corn starch and water to thicken the sauce.

Add in cooked noodles, peas, and carrot. Toss to thoroughly coat noodles with sauce. Remove from heat and serve. Garnish with some diced green onion.

I was surprised about the heat of the noodles, since there wasn't that much red pepper flake but I guess the ginger kicked it in. Don't get me wrong, it made my mouth happy but it was as hot as I would like it. Great combination of flavors and the leftovers are going to work with me tomorrow for lunch.

Time for another quick game of VERSUS:If you could only have one: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Other, or "I don't do Asian food"

My VERSUS answer:Yeah I know, it's a hard one because the first 5 are so good. Overall, I'd have to go with Thai (not like the pseudo Thai I made tonight) because I love the flavors of basil, fish sauce, oyster sauce, cilantro, peanut, pepper, coconut milk, etc.

I think I'd have to go with Japanese, however, I really haven't given Thai food it's fair shake, but the Thai restaurant (!) in town has horrible atmosphere. I know it's not fair of me to judge a food by one restaurant.